Now at last, after returning many times to Florence with lesser prizes, Leonardo took great pride in the fact that he had found the ancient books that his master sought. They were books of knowledge, purported to have come down from Thoth, the wisdom god of the Egyptians, who had been known to the Greeks as Hermes Trismegistus. And though neither Leonardo nor Cosimo were aware of this, these highly mysterious Hermetic texts had been compiled in Alexandria during the first three centuries of the Christian era, i.e. at the same time and in the same place as the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts. The link between the two collections becomes even stronger when we realise that a fragment of one of the Hermetic texts that Leonardo had purchased – a document known as the Asclepius – was also reproduced amongst the Gnostic codices buried at Nag Hammadi in the late fourth century and not recovered until 1945.1
The body is a tomb
No one can dispute that the Roman Catholic Church has a long trackrecord of vigorous opposition to all forms of knowledge, scripture, enquiry, wisdom and religious self-expression that do not accord with its own views. The reader will recall that it was mobs of Christians, aroused by Theophilus, the Catholic archbishop of Alexandria, who sacked the Serapeum in Alexandria in AD 391. They killed all the ‘pagans’ and Gnostics who had taken shelter inside it and razed to the ground the wonderful library that had been arranged around its cloisters together with its entire irreplaceable collection of ancient books and scrolls. We saw in Chapter Five that this atrocity was just one amongst many in the ruthless suppression of Gnosticism and paganism by the Catholic Church, and its generally very efficient destruction of their texts and traditions.
A different expression of this same antagonism to knowledge outside the narrow band accepted by orthodoxy was the closure in AD 529 by the Christian Emperor Justinian of Plato's revered Academy in Athens.2 Originally established by Plato himself in the 380s BC on a site a mile outside Athens that was already held sacred, the Academy enjoyed more than 900 years of continuous existence until Justinian and Christian bigotry shut it down for spreading ‘pagan’ ideas.
Today we do not know exactly what was taught at the Academy. However, Plato's own copious surviving writings have led the majority of scholars to infer that the original syllabus was designed to produce a select few wise philosophers, deeply knowledgeable in mathematics (including the theory of harmonics and astronomy), dialectics, natural science, and political theory3 who would: … leave the Academy for politics, not as power seekers themselves but to legislate or advise those in power.4
It is known that the great Christian Gnostic teacher Valentinus, an Egyptian, studied Platonic philosophy at Alexandria in the early second century AD,5 so it is perhaps not surprising to find the Catholic apologist Hippolytus (AD 170 – 236) accusing the Gnostics of being ‘disciples of Plato’ and following the Platonic system in making ‘arithmetical science the fundamental principle of their doctrine.’6 For our purposes it is also interesting that Plato seems to have been the first to use the term demiurge – Greek for ‘public craftsman’ – to describe the creator of the material world. In exactly the manner later copied by the Gnostics he meant to imply that the creator was a subordinate power, not the true God,7 and that the material world was a corrupt, imperfect copy of the ideal world.8 Tim Freke and Peter Gandy point out that Plato also frequently liked to quote a common phrase of the pagan mystery religions of his period – that phrase being soma sema, ‘the body is a tomb’: Gnostic initiates also understood that those who identified with the incarnate physical self were spiritually dead and needed to be reborn into eternal Life …9
It is beyond the scope of this book to present a full exposition of the similarities – and the differences – between Platonism and Gnosticism. The point we wish to make is simply that the suppression of Plato's Academy in AD 529 was part of a much wider attack on the pursuit of knowledge that also included the virtual destruction of Christian Gnosticism – until, we propose, it resurfaced in Bulgaria in the 10th century as Bogomilism. During the intervening centuries book burning was deemed an act of piety by the Church and the persecution of scholars who ventured outside strict ecclesiastical boundaries was deemed an act of righteousness and a service to God.
The enraged enforcement of an unearned spiritual monopoly
It is with good reason that historians refer to the period between the 5th and the 10th centuries AD as the Dark Ages. But things were to get much darker before European culture was to see any lasting glimmers of light. We've documented aspects of the astonishing ‘mini-Renaissance’ that accompanied the sudden upsurge of Catharism in Occitania in the 12th century. And we've documented the reaction of the Church – the Albigensian Crusades that laid waste the cultural development of the region, a century of terrorism and mayhem, the holocaust of 5,000 Cathar perfecti, and, last but not least, the Inquisition.
It should be obvious to the reader by now that Cathars and Catholics had very different attitudes to the uses and control of knowledge, and that these attitudes were rooted in their very different underlying philosophies.
For the Cathars, inheritors of the Gnostic tradition, the predicament of humanity was ignorance; it was knowledge, therefore, that would provide the only sure route of escape. And since they believed that the greatest store of relevant knowledge was contained in the New Testament – the fundamental document of Christianity – they felt strongly that every Cathar should be able to read it in his or her own language.
Accordingly the Cathars of Occitania had the New Testament translated from Latin, in which it had hitherto been locked away from the masses, into the vernacular langue d'oc, and large numbers of copies, laboriously prepared by hand, were put into circulation. The demand for a cheap convenient material on which such copies could be made led them to become the pioneers of paper-making in Europe, establishing numerous apprenticeships in the new trade10 and contributing greatly to the subsequent spread of this liberating technology.
In parallel, Cathar children were taught to read and study the New Testament from an early age, thus gaining the gift of literacy that was so rare in general in Europe in that period. Rare too was the fact that both sexes were taught equally, not just the males as was often the norm elsewhere.11 The result was that educated, literate, free-thinking women became a feature of Cathar communities during the short period that the heresy flourished.
In this, as in many other respects, the behaviour of the Cathars can only be described as enlightened – no other word will do – while their campaign to provide accessible vernacular editions of the New Testament was clearly an initiative far ahead of its time. By contrast the reader will recall from Chapter Seven that the Catholic Church and the Inquisition strictly forbade lay persons to possess the New Testament ‘with the exception of the Psalter, the Breviary, and the Book of Hours of the Blessed Virgin’. Moreover even these limited selections were permitted only in Latin whilst translations into the ‘vernacular tongue’ were ‘rigorously forbidden’.12
It seems ironic that the so-called heretics were the ones doing everything they could to spread knowledge of the New Testament while the ‘true Church’ was doing everything it could to limit and control such knowledge. But to understand this behaviour we need only remind ourselves of the basic philosophy of Catholicism – which utterly opposes any personal quest for knowledge and instead teaches blind faith and absolute mindless trust in the infallibility of papal dogma. It was this doctrine that snuffed out the brilliant light of scientific and spiritual enquiry that had flourished around the great libraries of Alexandria during the last three centuries BC and the first three centuries AD. It was this doctrine that plunged the world into the Dark Ages by suppressing not only Gnostic enquiry but also the vast bulk of ‘pagan’ classical knowledge. And it was this same doctrine of blind faith and unquestioning obedience – still top of the Catholic agenda a thousand years later – that led directly to the gross moral errors of the Albigensian Crusades and the Inquisition in the 13th and 14th centuries,
and to yet more suppression of books and knowledge, more burning of heretics, more terror and stupidity.
By the 15th century, though the persecution of individual heretics was far from over, European society was exhausted and sickened by all this mad violence, censorship and bigotry. By then, too, with the complete destruction of the Cathar threat well behind it, the vigilance of the Church itself had inevitably begun to slacken. Not quite certain what sort of backlash they might ultimately incur – but willing to take the risk – certain open-minded scholars took advantage of the lull to begin a quest for ancient manuscripts. Their frank hope was that by rediscovering the lost wisdom of the past they might better guide the world towards its unknown future.
One such scholar was Cosimo de’Medici who employed the monk Leonardo de Pistoia as his bookfinder. Now riding into Florence on the back of the little donkey that had carried him all the way from Macedonia, Leonardo anxiously fumbled in the bundle strapped at his side and felt once again the reassuring outline and weight of the miraculous, wonderful books that he was bringing to his master.
A philosopher with fire-power
The origin of the House of Medici is obscure, but ‘Medici’ means literally ‘medical doctors’ so a background amongst physicians and apothecaries is thought likely. Further back the family's ancestry may have included a humble charcoal burner who had moved into Florence from the nearby district of Mugello. But an apocryphal origin added much colour to their name. Legend had it that the family had been founded in the fifth century by a brave knight who came to Mugello and helpfully killed a fearsome giant who had been plaguing the local population. As a reward he was allowed to add to his shield eight red balls, one for each of the dents from the giant's attack. These red balls, others have suggested, either represented apothecaries’ pills or coins of the famous banking family that the Medici would later become.
Since 1239 the Medici had been official gonfaloniere of Florence (standard bearers and custodians of the city banner). By 1389, the year Cosimo was born, the family was already prominent and rich due to the banking activities of Cosimo's father, Giovanni. He had apparently benefited greatly from his personal friendship with Pope John XXIII, Baldassare Cossa, who later, in 1414, was to be accused of heresy, simony, tyranny, the murder of his predecessor Pope Alexander V, and the seduction of no less than 200 girls and ladies of Bologna!13
Named after Saint Cosmas, on whose feast day – 27 September – he had been born, Cosimo was educated at the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where he learnt French, German and Latin and a spatter of Hebrew, Greek and Arabic. In his teens he attended the lectures and lessons of one of the most prominent scholars in Florence, Roberto de’Rossi, also a member of an old and rich Florentine family. Through the influence of de’Rossi the young Cosimo acquired and developed a lasting respect and love for classical works, particularly Plato, and an insatiable interest in man's role and purpose on earth. In short, he was a philosopher in the ancient mould who, as it would turn out, would acquire the sort of fire-power that few lovers of wisdom ever enjoy.
Through political machinations and more especially through his influence on the papacy (he had befriended the popes and practically ran the finances of the Vatican), Cosimo was able to add greatly to the already enormous wealth of the House of Medici. His influence grew accordingly and he was soon the de facto ruler of Florence, a position that he was to maintain for the rest of his life. In 1458, just two years before the lost texts of the Hermetica were delivered to him, Cosimo was described as ‘master of the country’ by Pope Pious II: Political questions are settled in his house. The man he chooses holds office … He it is who decides peace and war and controls the laws … He is king in everything but name.14
The Florentine historian, Francesco Guicciardini, went even further when he said that Cosimo ‘had a reputation such as probably no private citizen has ever enjoyed from the fall of Rome to our own day.’15
All the learning of Constantinople and a new Platonic Academy
In 1438 Cosimo came up with a brilliant idea that, in a curious and indirect way, was to change the course of Western scholarship. For centuries, as the reader will recall, the Catholic Church, headed by the pope in Rome, had been in conflict over doctrinal issues with the Eastern Orthodox Church, headed by the patriarch in Constantinople. This great religious ‘West versus East’ schism reached a crisis point in the 1430s when Constantinople was beginning to be seriously threatened by the Muslim Ottoman Turks. Since the dramatic fall of Egypt and Alexandria to the Muslims in AD 642, the ‘Eastern’ empire of Rome, which extended from Turkey through to Egypt, had been slowly gnawed away by the Muslim forces. By 1438, all that remained in Christian hands was its capital, Constantinople, called the ‘Second Rome’. In the famous words of Mehmed II, the Ottoman sultan who would eventually capture the city in 1452 after a siege of six weeks, it was just ‘a monstrous head without a body’.
In 1438 John Paleologus, the Eastern Roman emperor whose seat was Constantinople, appealed to the pope in the name of all Christianity for military help to save the last bastion of Christendom in the East from falling into the hands of the Muslims. In response, Pope Eugenius IV decided to call for a great council to meet somewhere in Italy. Cosimo de’Medici, seeing the enormous prestige such a council would bring, especially if it achieved a reconciliation between the Eastern and Western churches, was determined that the venue should be his own city. Through his friendship with the pope, and by offering to cover all expenses plus a generous loan to the Vatican, Cosimo had his way, and in the winter of 1439, after a night of storms and torrential rains, the Eastern emperor, the Greek Orthodox patriarch and the pope all made their triumphal entries into Florence.
Months of deliberations and ecumenical debates followed until at last, in July 1439, the Council of Florence reached a compromise that brought the two churches together again. Predictably their reunification was short-lived; indeed the Eastern delegates barely had time to return to Constantinople before repudiating the feeble agreement. But there was an unexpected upside. Florence, all of Italy, and in due course the rest of Western Europe as well, were to benefit incalculably from the exciting intellectual stimulant provided by the large retinue of Byzantine-Greek scholars who had accompanied the Eastern emperor to the council. These scholars were amongst the prime catalysts in the remarkable Renaissance of classical history, art and philosophy that was soon to follow and they added new force to the already keen and burning interest of Cosimo de’Medici in Plato's works. The great Byzantine scholar, Bessarion, who had accompanied the Eastern emperor to Italy, was persuaded to remain behind, as well as his colleague Plethon, a leading authority on Plato.16
After attending lectures by Plethon, Cosimo had another inspiration. He would use some of his immense wealth to establish a Platonic Academy in Florence, modelled on Plato's original. Plethon's departure, and Cosimo's involvement with other issues, delayed the project for several years. Nonetheless the idea of the Academy did finally come to maturity. Its first home was the Villa Montevecchio in Florence and Cosimo appointed his adopted son, the brilliant scholar Marsilio Ficino, as its first director. Ficino had, in fact, been groomed for such a task by Cosimo over the years after noting the young man's keen enthusiasm for Plato's works, and it was Cosimo who had generously paid for Ficino's education and for his special studies in Greek and Latin.
Cosimo had for many years been an avid collector of rare and important books and made some valuable additional acquisitions from the Byzantine-Greek scholars who had attended the 1439 Council of Florence. His library, regarded as the most extensive collection of classical and religious works in Europe, formed the nucleus of the Medici Academy and was to serve eventually as a model for the Vatican's own library. Until 1460, however, the ultimate prize – the fabled works of Hermes Trismegistus – had eluded him as well as all other collectors in Europe.
Travel-stained and weary, the monk Leonardo da Pistoia now calmly directed his littl
e donkey into the Villa Careggi, the sumptuous residence of Cosimo de’Medici in Florence. He was admitted at once and delivered the bundle that he had carried so far directly to Cosimo himself.
Older than Moses, greater than Plato
It was well known to European scholars of the Renaissance that the great Greek philosopher Plato, and before him Solon and Pythagoras, had visited the land of Egypt and there had allegedly learnt the wisdom of the Egyptian sages. Plato, it was said, had special respect for the Egyptians – who he referred to as a ‘race of philosophers’.17 In his Timeus, famous for containing the earliest-surviving direct references to Atlantis, he recounted a story that had supposedly been told by Solon, the celebrated Athenian statesman and poet, after the latter had visited Egypt circa 600 BC. There, at Sais in the Delta area, Egyptian priests at the Temple of Neith apparently recognised Solon's wisdom and agreed to discuss with him issues related to the origin of the world. After listening to Solon expounding some of the Greek myths, however, one of the priests interrupted him and exclaimed: O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are all like children, and there is no such thing as an old [wise] Greek … You are all young in mind … you have no belief rooted in ancient tradition and no knowledge hoary with age …18